29 August 2005

Unbalanced

(Above: New DCU Defender Facundo Erpen carefully juggles the ball, before falling to the ground complaining that the ball punched him in the head. [AP/Wire])

Revolution 2 : 1 DCU

First: Dear Facundo Erpen -- We don't dive like that in DC. I want you to succeed on this team, but that dive was atrocious. Exaggerating an injury is one thing: Somebody took you down, you want them to pay. But inventing something out of nothing is a far more serious sin. It says "I'm too small a man to take my medicine, so I'll try and be deceitful to get out of it." Shame, shame. It's your first league game here, so I'll give you a break. But I hope Christian Gomez takes you aside before the RSL game and explains a few things. We're the black and red. We don't do that. On to the game...

Somehow, I felt it coming. After Boswell's poor back header resulted in his second own goal in as many league games, part of me was ready for the clock to reach 90:00 as soon as possible. New England had generated a few chances, and was almost no chance of them not putting one in the net by themselves. One point, and be happy about it.

Things started to get worse. Dema got a red card for having a history with the league. (Well, according to the stats, it was for a "Serious Foul Play". It looked to me like it was a dangerous challenge, but there was clearly intent to get the ball. Should have been yellow). The team looked distracted, and unable to feed the ball forward. Then Twellman beat Erpen to put the game away. From 1-0 with a chance to steal three on the road to a draw that might have been tough to take everywhere except the standings, to pure disappointment. This game hurt. DCU did not play as badly as they did against the Galaxy, but they didn't play particularly well and were marred by concentration lapses that have been coming all too frequently.

As discussed here earlier, a win by the Revs puts them in the driver's seat for taking the top seed in the East, while DCU now has to have ambitions for 2nd, and certainly for just making the playoffs (which I still think will happen).